Tall black stripes of varying widths projected onto a white wall seem to undulate like a quietly animated Bridget Riley painting, whereas shaped monochrome canvases might bring Ellsworth Kelly to mind . . . but artist Louis Cameron is as much influenced by supermarket merchandise as by these pioneers of abstraction, taking his cues from bar codes and the color schemes that shout out the brand identity of familiar products. (His paintings have titles like Aquafresh and Newport.) Similarly, the howling, oddly hued monkey in Laurie Hogin’s painting I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! may look like a random escapee from a 17th-century Dutch still life, but Hogin uses this strange creature to comment on how products we know (and love!) by brand name have come to invade our every waking moment. This particular monkey is one of several in her series “Allegory of Psychodemographics: Twenty-Four Brands My Family Uses in a Typical Summer Day” (2006), and she and Cameron are two of the 18 artists and three artist duos whose work is on view in “BRANDED AND ON DISPLAY” at Tufts University Art Gallery starting January 17. Given that virtually every activity in our lives is experienced through purchases, from Babies “R” Us to Batesville Casket, the exhibition’s focus on branding — that place where art and design meet to mess with our powers of critical decision making — is sure to resonate with those of us facing post-holiday bills.

In an interesting pairing, Tufts is also opening on January 17 “IVÁN NAVARRO: NO MAN’S LAND,” three pieces by an artist who grew up in Santiago during the reign of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and whose work joins formalism (treading overtly on the territories staked out by artists Dan Flavin and Tony Smith) with politics and everyday life. Navarro’s sculpture includes, among other things, a shopping cart made of fluorescent light tubes, and a big black cube that you can enter to find yourself serenaded by the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man.”

At Boston University, two one-person exhibitions are on the horizon:“DAVID ORDING: NEW PAINTINGS” opens in the Sherman Gallery on January 15 and “LEDELLE MOE: COLLAPSE” in the 808 Gallery on January 22. David Ording is known for oil paintings that revisit images from the canon of Western art history, transforming works by the likes of Courbet, Caravaggio, and Rubens. Ledelle Moe, who was born in Durban, creates sculptures that range from the huge to the tiny; there’s one group of enormous concrete heads that look like fallen monuments, massive yet fragile. Although Moe now lives and works in the US, you can see how her South African roots inform her perspective.

Bought and sold So I’d like to declare that art about consumerism is one of the æsthetic trends of our young millennium.

Across the Universe Intuition tells us that certain places are powerful, that certain spaces are sacred, and that we are sometimes in the presence of cosmic energy.

Instant messages The immediacy of communicating personal information that Internet culture and high bandwidth provide is not part of the new exhibition at the Mills Gallery, which eschews digital technology altogether.

Breakthroughs Tufts University Art Gallery's "Sixth Annual Juried Summer Exhibition" is one of those summer sampler shows that's got about a million people in it.

Senior years These are the BU Evergreeners — chatty and well-dressed, brandishing ballpoints and Starbucks.

School spirits It's back-to-school time, and you know what that means: throngs of college kids swarming the city, stealing back your summer fling (okay, he was19), and generally making you feel old.

Books tour While most area colleges continue to offer predictably boring campus tours that amount to wandering through academic ghost towns imagining departed crowds, there are also some alternatives to the standard walk-and-talk routine.

The unfaithful scholar Perhaps you were lured by the promise of original Abraham Lincoln speeches (Boston College) or a castle (Emerson’s Kasteel Well, a 12th century landmark in the Netherlands).

Weather reports One of the great themes in America is nostalgia for the "good old days," which flame into being and then fade into the distance.

Back in the USSR Gulag is the Russian acronym for the government agency that administered the famously harsh system of forced labor camps in the former Soviet Union, but it has come to refer more generally to that system of prisons and detention facilities.

Tempo tantrum In 2008, the fourth dimension, time, steps to the fore in the art world.

THE NATURE OF THE BEAST | September 10, 2008 In the world of graphic novelist Kevin Hooyman, whose show opens at Proof Gallery on September 13, packed line drawings take you deep into strange and fantastical scenes.

I AM I SAID | September 03, 2008 Tufts University Art Gallery presents “Empire And Its Discontents,” which opens September 15 with work by 11 artists tied to previously colonized regions in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.